1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a scanning method and apparatus and, more particularly, to a scanning method and apparatus by a station (STA).
2. Related Art
Recent Wireless LAN (WLAN) technology is basically evolving into three directions. There are Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) 802.11ac and IEEE 802.11 ad as efforts to further increase the transfer rate on the extension line of the existing WLAN evolution direction. IEEE 802.11 ad is WLAN technology using a 60 GHz band. Furthermore, a wide area WLAN that utilizes a frequency band of less than 1 GHz in order to enable wider area transfer than that of the existing WLAN in distance is recently emerging. The wide-area WLAN includes IEEE 802.11af utilizing a TV White Space (TVWS) band and IEEE 802.11ah utilizing a 900 MHz band. A main object of the wide-area WLANs is to extend extended range Wi-Fi service as well as a smart grid and a wide-area sensor network. Furthermore, the existing WLAN Medium Access Control (MAC) technology is problematic in that an initial link setup time is very long according to circumstances. In order to solve this problem and in order for an STA to rapidly access an AP, IEEE 802.11ai standardization is recently carried out actively.
IEEE 802.11ai is MAC technology in which a rapid authentication procedure is handled in order to significantly reduce the initial setup and association time of a WLAN, and standardization activities for IEEE 802.11ai has started as a formal task group on January, 2011. In order to enable a rapid access procedure, in IEEE 802.11ai, a discussion on procedure simplification in fields, such as AP discovery, network discovery, Time Synchronization Function (TSF) synchronization, authentication & association, and a procedure convergence with a higher layer, is in progress. From among them, ideas, such as procedure convergence utilizing the piggyback of a Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP), the optimization of a full Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP) using a concurrent IP, and efficient and selective Access Point (AP) scanning, are being actively discussed.